This Company Just Raised $6 Million To Build A Beeper

The
OnBeep cofounders, from left to right: product lead Roger Wood,
CEO Jesse Robbins, and CTO Greg Albrecht.OnBeep

Remember beepers? Those little clip-on electronics that allowed
you to communicate with others without using a telephone? Well,
just when we thought smartphones and wearables had made those
little pagers obsolete, one company is looking to bring them
back.

“There are countless mobile messaging apps, and
none of them give people a way to stay connected to each other
without having to look down at their smartphone,” Levandov said
in a press release. “We backed OnBeep because we believe they
will fundamentally change the way the world communicates.”

OnBeep was cofounded by Roger Wood,
previously a product designer for Nextel; Greg
Albrecht, previously a senior software engineer at Splunk;
and Jesse Robbins, a former Amazon Availability Program
Manager and cofounder of Chef, a software tool that is used to
streamline the task of maintaining servers.

Robbins serves as CEO and Wood serves as head of
product, while Albrecht is OnBeep’s CTO.

Robbins described the company’s product as one
similar to the two-way communicators used in “Star Trek,” but the
idea is to help groups of people — like families or companies —
communicate with one another in real-time without needing to
constantly reach for their smartphone.

The company says the device will pair with a
user’s smartphone but declined to offer details about what the
final design would look like or how much it would cost.

Perhaps OnBeep’s product will straddle the line
between the clunky pagers of yesteryear and the wearables of
tomorrow, which aim to put notifications on our wrists while also
offering us potential side benefits, like the ability to track
one’s health. OnBeep’s product will most likely look a little
more modern than the beepers of old: OnBeep’s 20-person team
consists of former employees from Apple, Google, Northrop
Grumman, and Lab126, Amazon’s hardware design lab.

We have reached out to OnBeep to learn more
about how its product will differentiate itself from typical
pagers and beepers, and we will update this story if we learn
more.